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It’s hard to imagine a business today that doesn’t have social media for its customer base. Whether you’re an independent candlemaker working out of your apartment in a suburb or an international corporation with employees numbering in the hundreds of thousands, you need social media. Social media isn’t just how a business gets noticed, it’s how a business thrives in a global market that’s constantly in flux.

Creating trending content that’s fresh and relevant can bring in higher interactions with both returning and potential followers of your brand and is an essential tool for long-term success. However, going a step further by paying close attention to your analytics can be an immeasurable asset to your return on investment (ROI).

Reviewing analytics is the key to gaining a quantifiable understanding of your business’ marketing strengths and needs. Remain a step ahead of your competitors by studying traffic patterns, trending searches, and the daily interactions of your followers. You’ll discover how to influence their purchasing decisions and anticipate trending patterns more effectively. Not only will your analytics help you to create more engaging content, it will lead to more financial freedom for your business to grow!

1. Learn Which Analytics Program Fits Your Needs

Google Analytics is the most popular resource for studying website and social media traffic and trending patterns, but some social media platforms already have Analytics built-in. Do your homework and find out which social media platforms and corresponding Analytics are best for collecting data towards your marketing goals. For example, if you have a WordPress blog for your independent clothing brand that’s less than a month old and an Instagram account that’s six months old, use your Instagram account and Instagram Insights as an Analytics springboard. For further reading, you can check out this comprehensive list of “Instagram Analytics Tools” by Fergus Baird (Hootsuite). The list begins at the halfway mark and summarizes each Analytics program’s pros and cons.

2. Create Your Analytics Priority List

It’s easy (and totally expected) to be initially overwhelmed by the concept of analytics. The terminology and principles of such extensive data collection can be intimidating. However, to echo point 4 of our blog post, 4 Time-saving Tips for Marketing Your Business, “Measure Only What Matters.” Is your priority to focus on bringing more traffic to your new website? Would you like to compare still photography versus Boomerang interactions on Instagram? Maybe you’re trying to decipher the best time to post on your public figure page on Facebook. The more specific and organized you are about the data you wish to collect, the better you’ll be at prioritizing your time to do so.

3. Let It Go

Last but not least, use analytics to compare different social media platforms and determine which ones rank highest in engagement with your followers. This is an excellent way to not only prioritize data collection but to also achieve your marketing goals more efficiently. You can always reintroduce social media platforms that didn’t make the cut in the future—or not! Once you’ve taken a proper inventory of which social media promotion strategies best serve your business, you can move forward with the knowledge and confidence you need to be exemplary of the adage, “Quality over Quantity.”

Analytics will increase your business’ ability to more effectively anticipate trending patterns and interactions, as well as influence the purchasing decisions of your followers, all while inspiring trust and loyalty to your brand. Should you have any questions about how Komaya can help you achieve your business marketing goals, read more on what we do or just contact us today!

It’s hard to imagine a business today that doesn’t have social media for its customer base. Whether you’re an independent candlemaker working out of your apartment in a suburb or an international corporation with employees numbering in the hundreds of thousands, you need social media. Social media isn’t just how a business gets noticed, it’s how a business thrives in a global market that’s constantly in flux.

Creating trending content that’s fresh and relevant can bring in higher interactions with both returning and potential followers of your brand and is an essential tool for long-term success. However, going a step further by paying close attention to your analytics can be an immeasurable asset to your return on investment (ROI).

Reviewing analytics is the key to gaining a quantifiable understanding of your business’ marketing strengths and needs. Remain a step ahead of your competitors by studying traffic patterns, trending searches, and the daily interactions of your followers. You’ll discover how to influence their purchasing decisions and anticipate trending patterns more effectively. Not only will your analytics help you to create more engaging content, it will lead to more financial freedom for your business to grow!

1. Learn Which Analytics Program Fits Your Needs

Google Analytics is the most popular resource for studying website and social media traffic and trending patterns, but some social media platforms already have Analytics built-in. Do your homework and find out which social media platforms and corresponding Analytics are best for collecting data towards your marketing goals. For example, if you have a WordPress blog for your independent clothing brand that’s less than a month old and an Instagram account that’s six months old, use your Instagram account and Instagram Insights as an Analytics springboard. For further reading, you can check out this comprehensive list of “Instagram Analytics Tools” by Fergus Baird (Hootsuite). The list begins at the halfway mark and summarizes each Analytics program’s pros and cons.

2. Create Your Analytics Priority List

It’s easy (and totally expected) to be initially overwhelmed by the concept of analytics. The terminology and principles of such extensive data collection can be intimidating. However, to echo point 4 of our blog post, 4 Time-saving Tips for Marketing Your Business, “Measure Only What Matters.” Is your priority to focus on bringing more traffic to your new website? Would you like to compare still photography versus Boomerang interactions on Instagram? Maybe you’re trying to decipher the best time to post on your public figure page on Facebook. The more specific and organized you are about the data you wish to collect, the better you’ll be at prioritizing your time to do so.

3. Let It Go

Last but not least, use analytics to compare different social media platforms and determine which ones rank highest in engagement with your followers. This is an excellent way to not only prioritize data collection but to also achieve your marketing goals more efficiently. You can always reintroduce social media platforms that didn’t make the cut in the future—or not! Once you’ve taken a proper inventory of which social media promotion strategies best serve your business, you can move forward with the knowledge and confidence you need to be exemplary of the adage, “Quality over Quantity.”

Analytics will increase your business’ ability to more effectively anticipate trending patterns and interactions, as well as influence the purchasing decisions of your followers, all while inspiring trust and loyalty to your brand. Should you have any questions about how Komaya can help you achieve your business marketing goals, read more on what we do or just contact us today!

Artificial Intelligence has been on the rise in the technology sector for years, and until recently was a very specialized tool that only the most advanced companies and researchers were using. Now, AI has managed to integrate its way into a more everyday application geared at making our lives, ability to work, and the capacity to analyze information far more efficient. One of the platforms that AI has taken to like a duck to water is the website experience. To better understand how AI can be used to enhance your website experience, we take a look at its two-fold impact; the customer experience is enhanced, and the company’s ability to use analytics to the fullest is pushed beyond the previously established boundaries.

The Customer Experience

So much of whether the company makes money or not through the website is determined by the customer experience. One of the largest catalysts that AI has provided to enhance this factor is voice- and visual-search based queries. In a study performed by Gartner, it is predicted that by 2021, early adopter brands that redesign their websites to support visual- and voice-search will increase their digital commerce revenue by 30 percent. A major retailer that has already taken advantage of AI and its ability to enhance the customer experience is Amazon. It has been reported that customers actually prefer searching for items directly on Amazon.com as opposed to doing a Google search. While using the Amazon App from a smart device you can easily dictate your search into the information field. If you take a critical look at the website, many of the options given to you are represented by an image or graphic. Not only is this new way of searching convenient for the average customer, but it also gives customers with disabilities the opportunity to be more independent!

But search features aren’t the only way that speech interaction is improving the customer experience, Chatbots also make a customized experience more attainable. These AI channels are becoming so advanced that it is rapidly resembling the interaction with a real human consultant. It is even theorized that these Chatbots will eventually be able to read our emotional reactions to products and situations! Imagine walking or driving up to a coffee shop and having a chat pop up on your phone letting you know what your last order was, and asking if you would like to not only order it again but also if it can charge the same mode of payment you used previously as well. You could have ordered, purchased, and picked up your drink without ever having to stand in line.

The Business Experience

The business experience has a symbiotic relationship with the customer experience. While the customer is interacting with the AI and having a convenient mode to get what they want; the business is using all the information that the AI is collecting from the customer, and using it to better the customer experience. This allows for an increase in profit through becoming smarter about their business and products or services. An example of this is tracking information like the most searched for terms on the website, the item or service that is selling the most units, or the converse, the item or service selling the least units. It notes what parts of the website are being interacted with the most, which can help simplify the user interface in the future. The metrics that the AI can generate are endless, as are the possibilities to use this information for positive change in the future.

Integrating AI into your webpage can take your online experience to a new level. Here at Komaya, we love keeping abreast of emerging technology and ways that it might help enhance the web presence of our client’s brands.

Over the past decade, a business’s online presence has been revolutionized from a single website to a complicated mix of social media platforms. Usually “complicated” is the kind of word that packs just enough negative connotation to make you cringe and shy away. But never fear! In this case, complicated is good. This complicated mix allows consumers the opportunity to interact with your business in a lot of different ways – with each medium offering a unique perspective on what your brand is all about. If executed properly, your social media mix can be the key to putting your brand ahead of competitors.

That all sounded great, right? Well here’s the catch: obtaining and maintaining an amazing online presence won’t happen overnight. Curating a social media mix that benefits your brand and suits your needs is the first obstacle, but then comes the challenge of managing all those separate accounts. In addition to a website, most businesses will have accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, LinkedIn and more. One will find that effectively managing all these mediums on their own can be extremely time consuming and stressful. That my friends, is where social media scheduling tools come in.

With the right tool, or mix of tools, you can schedule out posts for weeks in advance, freeing up your schedule and reducing stress. Without further ado, here are a couple of our favorite social media scheduling tools for your business:

Save time by managing all your social media marketing efforts from a single dashboard. With Hootsuite’s platform, you get the tools to manage all your social profiles and automatically find and schedule effective social content.

“Measure your social ROI”

Make smarter, data-driven social media marketing decisions with confidence. Hootsuite’s real-time analytics let you spot trends as they develop and drill down for insights on how your social content is performing.

If you’re not convinced Hootsuite is right for your business, not to worry! You can try their limited (3 social profiles) free plan, so you can get familiar with their platform. They also offer a 30 day free trial for most of their business plans to test their social media management offerings. After that, business plans range from $19+ per month.

Powerful publishing tools make it easy to share content across multiple social networks with one click.

While Buffer offers team and agency plans starting at $99 per month, they do have a free and $10/month pricing for limited social media networks. Buffer also offers a free trial for businesses looking to test out their full-fledged services.

While Hootsuite and Buffer are great options for a business seeking to get control of their online presence, it is important to note that these tools are by no means the only ones that can benefit your brand. There is an abundance of other resources available that can assist you in taking your online presence to the next level (to read about some of those, click here). Hootsuite and Buffer were chosen because they are fairly simple to use, and they do it all.

https://www.komaya.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/shutterstock_224826490-Sm.jpg373500Julianne Smithhttps://www.komaya.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Komaya-Logo-2018-4.pngJulianne Smith2017-05-03 21:30:502017-10-04 18:42:45Taking the Stress out of Social Media: An Introduction to Social Media Management Tools

There are far too many areas within web development in need of innovation today. However, as I see it the biggest areas for innovation in this space are:

Big Data – Everyone is talking about big data and how important and impactful it is on business today. However, I’m not reading much about it when it comes to the web. Let’s face it, businesses who are worth their salt have information and some form of branding and/or marketing on the web. That’s a pretty simplistic achievement by today’s standards. The next big leap for business is to move their practices, information access, and even their management to the web. That will mean the need for broader, device independent access, support for heterogeneous data sources both big and small, embracing the mobile user base regardless of deployment preference: on-premise or cloud, and a lot more use of machine learning and predictive analytics geared toward real-time decision making. All of this encompasses our use of what’s called Big Data today. However, the innovations surrounding the use of it today are small and will pale in comparison to what the future holds.

Web Intelligence – As our knowledge of design and user experience expands, we begin to expand our belief system; re-examining what is and isn’t possible in the world wide web. We already employ intelligent algorithms used for machine learning and predictive analytics.

However, I envision a world where those same algorithms, spread across thousands of source systems, will join into a global intelligence network providing behavior pattern recognition, experience insights, and even pattern-based categorization.

Yes, the web is about to become a whole lot more intelligent and Komaya will be right there helping to shape it, mold it, and to help our clients benefit greatly from it.

Performance – I believe that over the next 3-5 years we will see vast improvements over the current forms of image and video compression of today. Development tools will be smarter and automatically analyze images to find the sweet spot, such that the quality is high enough and the file size is as small as possible. More than that though, web servers of the future will work harder and smarter and will have built-in features that make experience and performance decisions on-the-fly. Those server-side algorithms will process each element of a page transmission and evaluate things like:

What is the client type?

What is the overall page size being requested?

Do images need existing transparency?

Do images need their animated elements?

Do images contain non-visible data?

and will be able to act accordingly to ensure the down-stream clients, regardless of type get the best possible speed and visual experience. Rest assured that every innovation we see between now and even 5 years from now will itself lead to even more opportunities. It’s an exciting time to be in the web space.

How will sites of the future effect revenue?

The short answer is they already do in some very big ways. As new web standards emerge, we see a continual need from our clients to include more and more visual elements. These changes are exciting and new and draw more and more traffic to their sites, which is good! More traffic can equate to more revenue. However, more imagery equates to bigger page sizes which can become big performance problems very quickly. Page performance effects revenue, plain and simple. Small sites, like AutoAnything, cut their load time in half, and saw revenue grow by 13 percent. Large sites, like Amazon have shown that for every 100 milliseconds of performance slowdown, they experience a 1 percent drop in revenue. This is especially true for mobile users. Large pages mean long load times and poor perceived performance. While that does mean big money for the mobile carriers who are all too eager to cash in on the data plans, it also means a lot of frustration for downstream mobile users which equates to less money for those sites as traffic is driven away by poor performance. Sites of the future will have all of the essential elements in-check, striking a good balance between stellar visual experience and high performance.

How will Komaya’s products and solutions be different five years from today?

Current trends are pointing toward a world in which the web plays larger, more relevant and even strategic roles in everyday business. It’s no secret that web implementations are as varied as the sands in the Sahara. Today’s businesses are already seeing the need to expand their web presence to include social, marketing, and other such information. It’s not a big stretch to say that super visual, interactive, and data oriented sites will emerge as the new normal in the next couple of years. Those exciting new sites will have elements that mix state-of-the-art visualization with data that spans a variety of source systems, and languages, each tailored to the user’s expectations and experience. Yes, it’s apparent that the need for smarter, real-time, on-the-fly operations, data presentations, and visualizations becomes the new norm, even for smaller businesses in which staying alive and continuing to be competitive becomes paramount.
Komaya is gearing up to meet these challenges head-on. In fact over the next three to five years we’ll have sites that employ a wide variety of visualization and data technologies with incredible performance! We’ve got algorithms that interpret or infer what a users’ needs are and make requests to cache necessary data preemptively. I think that’s enough of a peak behind the curtain for now though.

What is the most exciting part of your job?

There are many exciting elements in what I consider my job. Not the least of which are the many opportunities I have to interact with our prospects and clients. I really do enjoy helping them realize their dreams and see their successes! A close second is the opportunity to interact and rub shoulders with some of the smartest developers in the world. There are so many opportunities in front of us. From technologies to explore and employ, to stale areas of web design ripe for innovation, there are far too many variables for things not to be constantly exciting and new around here. Our very existence depends on our ability to make our clients’ visions a reality. That means that things that seem impossible today, are the very things we’re toying with. The goal for all of us at Komaya is to make today’s impossibilities tomorrow’s possibilities and even realities. I believe that we will be a key player in revolutionizing the way we think about web solutions, their varied implementations, and much more. You see, it doesn’t really matter what’s impossible today. To quote Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass: “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”